Glenn Greenwald on the Bush Leaguers' habit of crying wolf:
To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don't like is Adolf Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.
From this it follows that every warmonger is the glorious reincarnation of the brave and resolute Winston Churchill. And one who opposes or even questions any proposed war becomes the lowly and cowardly appeaser, Neville Chamberlain. For any and every conflict that arises, the U.S. is in the identical position of France and England in 1937 – faced with an aggressive and militaristic Nazi Germany, will we shrink from our grand fighting duties in appeasement and fear, or will we stand tall and strong and wage glorious war?
Glenn goes on to take this one apart card by card, specifically in regard to Iran, but also generally, pointing out along the way that crying Hitler is an old Bush family trick. George the First did it to encourage us all in our yellow ribbon-tying back in 1990 when he was gearing us up for his war.
One of Glenn's important points is that, besides being cynical scare tactics, the Hitler comparisons are absurd, given the little tinpot dictators they're applied to and whom we're meant to be scared of.
It's not enough, says Glenn, to want to be a Hitler or to talk like a Hitler or even to try to mimic Hitler as a tyrant and murderer of your own people---you have to be capable of a Hitleresque scale of evil and mass destruction.
Which, as Glenn points out, the Bush League warmongers know. That's why they always back up their Hitler Warnings with outrageous lies.
They don't just say that their Hitler of the Day is as evil-minded as Hitler. They say that their little Hitler has Hilter's capablities and every intention of acting upon them any minute.
I suppose it's possible to be relatively Hitler-esque. An evil dictator can do to a region of the world or to his own country what Hitler attempted on a global scale.
But the warmongers don't argue that way. Probably because they know that a lunatic faraway playing Hitler in his own backyard wouldn't be sufficiently scary to most Americans, but possibly also because they realize that an argument to go to war to stop a tyrant from tyrannizing his own citizenry and his neighbors is an argument for humanitarian wars, which they don't want to fight.
Let's say this again, slowly. The we're here to save the Iraqi people from Saddam and bring them Freedom was an argument the Bush Leaguers adopted after they'd committed us to war, when they knew that after no Weapons of Mass Destruction turned up people might start asking uncomfortable questions. We did not invade Iraq to save the Iraqi people. We did not invade Iraq to take away Saddam's WMD. We invaded Iraq because George Bush wanted to and Dick Cheney saw financial and political profit in it.
The cynics in the Bush Administration don't want to fight humanitarian wars because there's nothing to be gained from them. And the neo-cons only want to fight wars that increase the power of the United States...or, to put it more realistically, which decrease their own fears and paranoia.
So the threat must always be said to be to us, and it must always be said to be immediate. The little Hitlers must always be portrayed as if they had ten thousand Panzers lined up on the borders of Poland and France, with their engines running and their cannon loaded.
Moving away from Glenn's post now. There's a wonderful historical irony in the Right's seeing Hitlers popping up from behind every sand dune.
These are people who are the ideological, "intellectual," political, cultural, social, and, in some cases, biological heirs of American conservatives who opposed FDR's attempts to get us ready to fight a war against the real Hitler. They weren't merely isolationist or obstructionist, they were in many cases actively admiring of der Fuehrer.
(The neo-cons are the ideological heirs of people who were intellectually whipsawed by Stalin's danse macabre with Hitler. Stalin's temporary separate peace with the Nazis fractured the American Communists sixteen ways from Sunday. I hope burritoboy stops by in the comments to explain how that has been playing itself out in the present.)
Point this out and some indignant conservative will come along to deny it. But for now let's just remember that over 10 years after he flew across the Atlantic Charles Lindbergh was not still a cultural hero just because of his contributions to the advancement of aviation.
The American Right has had no problem admiring militaristic strongmen who keep the riff-raff in line and the trains running on time.
Didn't then. Doesn't now.
The two great moral failings of the Republican Party in the last century were its pre-war isolationism and its resistance to the Civil Rights movement, and it makes psychological sense to say that the Party's obsession with identifying and waging war on little Hitlers is the sign of a collective guilty conscience. The Republicans, those that follow in lockstep behind President Bush, which is about all of them, may be trying to make amends in the present for their inherited sins of the past.
For all the talk about appeasement being the posture of the Left, they must know deep down that Hitler was betting on the United States not entering the war or at least not entering it soon enough to save England. And the reason he bet that way was because he knew that Roosevelt had strong opposition from the American Right.
We didn't get into the war soon enough, by the way. England very nearly was on the brink of surrender. Churchill had his own Right Wing appeasers to deal with and the Blitz was taking a terrible toll. The RAF saved the day. You want to know the secret to Churchillian rhetoric, Mr Bush? Speak the truth.
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Well, it may be that some of the warmongers on the Right are trying to make up for the sins of their ideological fathers. It may be that some of them are trying to convince themselves that if they had lived back then they wouldn't have been among the isolationists.
But the reality is that crying Hitler is what they do because it has worked.
It could very well work again.
Certainly Karl Rove is hoping to turn 2006 into a replay of 2002. The Democrats were expecting to pick up seats in Congress that year too.
As many wiser bloggers have pointed out, the immediate goal of the sabre-rattling on Iran is to maintain the Republican lock on Congress.
That doesn't mean that Iran will cease to be the new Nazi Germany come the second Wednesday of November.
Even if the Democrats take control of one or even both houses, the Bush Leaguers will still be crying Hitler.
In fact, if the Democrats win, I expect George Bush will grow even more determined to bomb the mullahs.
Unless he's already done it.
End of Part One. Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister for the link to Glenn's post. See Melissa's post on The Administration Who Cried Hitler.
This seems like a good opportunity for me to inject something I've been thinking about regarding the "Evangelical" argument for war. Or, if it's not, I'm going to take it anyway.
I was ill and recuperating in bed at Christmas time when the rest of my family saw the movie version of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe," but I was finally healthy enough to watch it when they decided to rent it on Easter.
The movie, which was well done, or maybe the premise of the story--a premise of many stories that I've always been uneasy about--got me thinking about John Calvin.
Or maybe Milton. Or maybe just John (as in the author of Revelations)--although I and my pastor are heratic enough to believe firmly that the Book of Revelations is misread as a "Jesus is coming, and boy is he ticked!" kind of treatise--but that's another story.
Milton may have lifted the folklore behind "Paradise Lost" from somewhere, but it wasn't the Bible as far as I can tell. I do know that in his more ego-inflated moments (ha!) he saw his poem as a Third Testament, so probably he made the whole good angels vs. evil angels up. Amazing, though, that so many Catholics--and probably Protestants, too, though I can't speak for them--believe that this is actually FACT.
Anyway, I'll get to my point because I know I'm boring everyone: In the Calvinistic view, and Milton was essentially a Calvinist, so also in the Miltonian view--and in C.S. Lewis' supposedly Christian parable--there is an ongoing war between good and evil. However, good is always going to triumph; we just don't know how, and we don't know when. But Jesus is coming, and boy is he...well, you know.
So resistance is futile because we're going to holy roll over you.
That view is so nice for "Christian" leaders to exploit when they want to whip the rabble into a frenzy in order to stage a war. As long as the enemy is cast as "the evil," then killing them isn't a sin--any more than Aslan biting the head off of the White Witch was portrayed as a violent and perhaps unnecessary act to end the war (if you didn't see the movie, I think LM reviewed it a while back, or you can look it up to find out more about this war).
I think many Western wars have been fought based on this Miltonic view--which of course predates Milton, when you consider the fights the Israelites had with all of their enemies, up through the Crusades (Christians vs. Muslims...hmmm).
Certainly it's easy to conceive of a guy like Hitler as being the essence of evil--not human, not a physical body, but a force to be not merely defeated but destroyed if the universe is ever going to rest. Though I think that's giving even Hilter too much credit. But all of the other "evils" humanity has fought against...well, the jury is out.
OK, I'll wrap it up now, if anyone is still with me this far. Interesting that a non-political philosophy for living one's life in order to enhance one's relationship with the divine nature of God, a philosophy based on the OPPOSITE of waging war, of getting even, of biting the head off of your enemy before you can truly say you've won, becomes the politcal argument for doing just that. Maybe it's true that when Jesus comes, he will indeed, be ticked!
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 02:32 PM
While we're on the subject of lessons from the 30's that we're doomed to repeat, it seems that the complicity of ordinary Germans is a meme that could be profitably resurrected. You start small (torture, rendering, wiretapping, etc.) and suddenly you wake up to discover that your fearless leader is swaggering about claiming to be the only one with the courage to use tactical nukes in an unprovoked attack. It really is long past time to apply the defibrillator to the Congress and insist of a bit of oversight.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 03:56 PM
"although I and my pastor are heratic enough to believe firmly that the Book of Revelations is misread as a "Jesus is coming, and boy is he ticked!" kind of treatise--but that's another story."
Mac- what's the other story??
Posted by: Jennifer | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 04:36 PM
I wrote a review of Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America" where I maintained that he was writing an allegory for our current politics, even if he didn't intend to.
Roth's book posited that Lindbergh defeated FDR in 1936 or 1940 (can't remember which) and "kept us out of war," eventually creating internment camps for Jews in America, among other things. So much for "it can't happen here."
Posted by: Linkmeister | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 05:24 PM
"So much for "it can't happen here." "
Er, one problem is that it DID happen here. In the Jim Crow South. People don't want to remember that the Jim Crow South states, were far-right-wing authoritarian regimes based on terror and oppression.
1. Far from being democratic, most of these states were one-party regimes. Voting was heavily restricted - of course, to blacks, but also very much also to poor whites. In most of these states, power has NEVER been actually turned over from one political party to another (except under military compulsion).
2. In actuality, the Jim Crow South was run by interlocking cabals of the Concerned Citizen's Councils (which also coordinated policies across the various states). Public politics was an entertaining sideshow to distract the populance, while real goverance took place in secret.
3. Decisions were enforced by oppression and violence. Beyond the known lynching incidents (which numbered in the thousands) and the unreported incidents (which probably also numbered in the thousands), political violence was frequently deployed on the behalf of the Jim Crow regimes against a wide panoply of these regimes' enemies (white, black, etc.).
Posted by: burritoboy | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 05:42 PM
Amigo, upgrade your sarcasm detector. That's what I meant. ;)
Posted by: Linkmeister | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 05:55 PM
And on another tangent from the Thirties, isn't there something about our conservative stalwarts that resembles the French Right of that time, th e ones that preferred Hitler to Leon Blum. They subverted the Republic until they got what they wanted, the Vichy regime of Petain. For those doubters, look only to the interregnum of Clinton, when those on the right did more than become the "Loyal Opposition." Perhaps the only difference was that their gold did not flee the country, but was used to fund the takeover of the media.
Posted by: Exiled in New Jersey | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 08:11 PM
Without sounding too heretical in this time of year when many believe a god became man and died to rise again, we need to remember that even the most evil among us is still a man. Or was a man. The capacity to inflate the evil of men beyond the human scale comes from the same dark part of the mind or soul that makes our enemies at the same time less than human.
So we adopt all kinds of superhuman efforts and often inhumane means to deal with these Others, all with great justification. Who believes they deserve an early heaven here on earth is usually the first to condemn someone else to hell. Oy.
Posted by: The Heretik | Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 01:22 AM
billmon beat glenn to this post. but i'm glad to see the idea is spreading. i think this hitler/munich 1938 narrative has been THE major source of aggressive (and mostly useless) military action for the last 70 years.
Posted by: a-train | Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 11:55 AM